satellite

Before this journey, I updated the satellite navigation DVD in the car. It covers the whole of europe to street level and I suppose a few things had changed since I put the last one in about two years ago. It will be refreshing to have the whole of the M6 toll road now recognised instead of a section described alarmingly as 'off road'.

But what has also changed is the way certain things get described by the voice commentary in the latest version. The lady's voice now also says 'go straight ahead at the roundabout' as well as things like 'take the third exit on the left' which is a pleasing surprise, even more so with complicated instructions which do seem clearer. I've also found that deliberately ignoring an instruction and taking a different route is now rewarded with far less 'make a U turn where possible' and much better adaptation to the new route.

I do still take a paper road atlas too, though.

sounds of the city

There's something quite reassuring about living in the centre of a town. For a while I lived at the junction in the centre of a small town with a church with loud bells, a couple of noisy pubs (Bierbrunnen, in particular) - a Wienerwald restaurant and a cinema that also showed late night Turkish movies. The road junction had interesting traffic light sequences and was on a hill and if it snowed then cars would struggle, rev noisily and slither sideways and the pubs, cafes and cinema meant there was a reasonable amount of late night noise.

So tonight, here in Gothenburg, I feel quite reassured, in a well-established hotel which looks out onto a main thoroughfare with the same type of evening sounds. I've already been for a delightful candlelit meal in the nearby Kellaren and have been spending a few minutes watching the world go by. It may be past 10p.m. but its still good daylight here and it looks as if there will be a few parties before the sun starts to wake again at around 3 a.m.

dropping a columbian

Sometimes the only hit that will do is strong columbian.

We're talking Magnum here. Thats the ice cream known in UK as Wall's and here in Scandinavia as GB Glace. Pro capita ice cream consumption in Scandinavian countries is amongst the highest globally, and Sweden is only second to Finland for coffee consumption per head. So a magnum opus of ice cream and columbian coffee with crunchy bits and chocolate hits the wuzzometer pretty hard.

The only problem is the consistent Magnum moment, which affects most consumption.

Picture this; the wrapper is off, you've crunched through the top still slightly frozen chocolate, applauded the crunchy sub strata, tasted the top mouthful of ice cream and are just breaking into the swirly bit.

Then it happens; a segment about the size of half a watch strap falls from the lower corner, grazes clothing enough to indicate the presence of chocolate and falls to the ground.

The dilemma. Its a big enough piece of the experience to warrant a rescue operation...Does the rule of three apply (you know, if its on the floor for less than three seconds its still retrievable). Who is looking? What does the floor look like? Is there really enough to go around without that piece. But why o why does it always happen.

We should be told.

Norwegian wood

Across the border today from Sweden into Norway. The crinkly bits of countryside were immediately visible. Norwegian scenery only does 'eleven'. Every twist and turn is something that makes you want to say 'whoa!'. So I'm not sure about "isn't it good, Norwegian wood?", but I know that Norwegian scenery is just great.

An idle sub project of visiting Sweden was to do some elk and reindeer spotting. Here in Norway its "What kind would you like? I'll just arrange for them to walk in front of you." The northern nights stay light even later than where I'd been in Sweden, so the Beatle's story about talking till two has a lot of truth.

sundborn

Amongst today's travels was a stopover in Sundborn, which was the home of the famous Swedish painter named Carl Larsson. The guide books tell you to look at the Swedish design of the house, which used contemporary ideas from other parts of Europe, but created a style which is now a characteristic of 'traditional' Swedish. I found the house more appealing because of the way the family life had been portrayed there.

Described as small, for its day I suspect it was quite a well-off middle class property although it did eventually have to house Carl, his wife Karin (also a painter and later a designer) and their six children.

My trip around the house was with a chatty Swedish guide - in Swedish, so I had to guess most of what was being said, but overall I found the place quite endearing and with a reasonable amount of wry humour from Carl Larsson in the way the place was decorated.

This house has now become one of the most famous artist's homes in the world and shows the development of his paintings using the colour reproduction technology of the day (circa 1890-1910).

There are conventional paintings in oil and watercolour and also what must be some of the fore-runners of the modern day cartoon, not as actual cartoons, but using styles we would all recognise today. I gather he did also produce some sequential stories in this form although I have not seen them. At the end of the tour are a large collection of paintings and drawings including a wall fresco, more paintings of his family as well as what looks like a life-size Will Young in *ahem* just a cap going for a stroll in the woods (I was told to put that last piece in).

Something that comes across strongly is Larsson's love for his family and the many and enjoyable ways they are depicted as well as the sheer volume of his output, not just in paintings, but also as wall frescos, such that hardly a portion of the home is untouched.

tags technorati : rashbre sweden carl larsson will young art

shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages and kings

It's really too difficult to blog about even a day trip to a capital city and to incorporate more than a scratch of what one has seen and learned. I've taken photographs and a short video as a way to help jog my own mind about this, but for anyone trying to get more than a glint of the coverage it would be a challenge.

Take shoes: alongside the usual trainers and athletic walking boots storming the pavements, there's a preponderance of clog like shoes too. I looked in a shoe shop and they are actually called - clogs. Different from the dutch wooden clogs sold as souvenirs, these are a hybrid between flip-flops and a clog like appearance - multi coloured and sometimes decorated.

And ships: there's the Tall Ship event in Stockholm this coming weekend and the city is in preparation. There are already people walking around with 'Tall Ships 2007' lanyards around their necks - I assume they must be organizers. I've been out on the water today, along to the home of the King at Drottningholm - which is a few kilometres through the archipelagos and the site of a rather splendid palace and grounds.

The Kings and Queens of Sweden have had a tumultuous past, with a kind of partial acceptance of the role by the government and people in what is technically a constitutional monarchy. In the past, there have been times when govenment forged the assent of the royals to the legislation of the day.

SInce despotic King Gustav the Third built a superb theatre in the grounds of the palace but was finally assasinated for wasting money back in the 18th Century, through to the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, there has been a sometimes bumpy ride for leaders in Sweden.

All seems to be in balance now, although we mustn't forget the murder of the Swedish foreign minister - Anna Lindh - once tipped to be the next prime minister, back in 2003, but stabbed to death in a famous department store in central Stockholm.

Stockholm

Stockholm feels as a city that it should have a larger population than the estimated 750,000. It is spread over about 14 islands and has a series of interconnecting bridges between areas which can look distinctly different from the old town of preserved buildings, to the relative modernity of a large mainly glass culture centre in another area. There's also a lot of below street level walk-ways which are a way to provide protection in the cold of Winter. Parts of the sea and rivers freeze at that time.

But right now, Sweden is out in force, shopping and wandering through the lanes and alleys of the town, enjoying coffee, waffles and ice cream and planning day trips to the country side. All of Sweden stops for a few weeks in July- the main vacation season, taking advantage of the short Swedish summer.

My wanderings today included several of the islands, some of the stores (Harry Potter everywhere!), a few smaller shops, some museums (which are free) and the inevitable coffee shop along the way. Sweden loves its coffee and remains a Starbuck free zone.

Stockholm evening

Stockholm arrival during early evening.

Time enough to locate a hotel in the Gamla Stan (old town) and then after dropping some bags in the room to fall out into the mid evening and find a restaurant.

Tonight, it was a Russian place called Tsarskij Sad, just behind the hotel. I'd already done a short stroll to check for other nearby interesting places - and there were quite a few - but the Russian stood out as both inviting and interesting. So I tried Russian bread, cucumbers, pickles and a kind of pie called Kurnik. Yum.

Amused to see a lone diner in the nearby Italian reading the new Harry Potter; yes its reached Sweden too.

meander

Changing plans for today meant re-jigging hotels too. The first challenge was to back out of the one in the current town without a large penalty. I reckoned that charging last evening's meal to the hotel bill would help and sure enough they were gracious about letting us leave a day early.

So then it was off across Sweden with no particular place to go. We opted for a diagonal route on a meaningful but minor road and I lazily tapped a destination into the Sat-Nav in the general direction, so that I could have some verbal assistance from the car if needed.

We aimed for the large lakes in the middle of Goteland adjacent to the Goteland Canal which links the east and west coasts of Sweden between Goteberg and Stockholm. It turned out to be a good decision, with pretty scenery and some attractive stopping points, including a lovely hotel on the canal, but alas the only room at the inn was one a tiny one with bunk-beds, so we decided to keep moving.

Indeed, we also tried a large ex-monastery on the shores of Lake Vattern, but the spook factor from the previous evening was a little too powerful- together with the promise of evening bats, so we kept moving instead and took a late afternoon decision to push on to Stockholm, which at this point was a mere 250 kilometres away.

spooky castle town with mud

Kalmar in Sweden is on the eastern coast around 300 kilometres south of Stockholm. It was supposed to be the venue for a two day pause in the travelling, in what was expected to be a delightful hotel set in grounds overlooking a tranquil view of the sea.

Not quite.

The hotel was in grounds which were were being converted into an area to contain a new cultural centre. Most of the surroundings were a building site. There was no real view and the room was really too small to house occupants and baggage at the same time.

Nothing for it, after a stroll around the town, it was easy to make a decision to pull the plugs and move on a day early. Late afternoon meant an overnight stop here was inevitable and so evening saw me pulling a heavy case or two up some steep stair into a poet's garret.

By the second drink everything seemed better accompanied by a plan for an early morning departure.

Its reassuring to know that a whole trip would have some moments of texture and this was one of those episodes. So after a walk through the 'muddy' parkland adjoining the castle (a great test for some recently acquired flip-flops), it became an evening watching Swedish subtitled television and then preparation for an early departure towards the Gotecanal and onward towards Stockholm.

making it all fit together

One of the interesting features of this type of vacation is the road trip nature of it. Sometimes I take vacation all in one place, or maybe two, and other times keep on movin'.

This is one of the latter and already just a few days in, there has been considerable change of scene and different locations. At the moment, its been a combination of sea, lakes and hills with small towns mainly with mediaeval times in their backgrounds. As the journey progresses there will be mountains and cities as well, but even after few days, it starts to become difficult to remember the exact sequence of travel. I can see why people keep journals.

And the journal I've cracked into whilst travelling is the Alistair Campbell extracts related to the Tony Blair years. I'd decided to dislike this almost before I started it, but have actually found it quite interesting and strangely human in the way it describes things. Campbell has a reputation as a spin meister and presumably ther has been some fairly careful editing of the content of the diaries, not least to stay legal in what is said.

Nonetheless, the amount of minor detail, dealt with in a clipped journalistic style, suggests that large chunks of the text must be fairly accurate renderings of what actually happened. Being a day by day account, it would be quite difficult to retrospectively doctor the entire storyline, particulalrly where so many different events overlap.

I'm only on about page 100 at present-just past the Blair visit to Clinton at the White House, but admit, to my slight surprise, that I'm enjoying this story of the yet to be elected Tony Blair and his band of politicos as they try to make a plausible bid for power.

I'm not sure whether there are lessons being learned, but I do expect that Campbell's journal will become one of the defining descriptions of the Blair years.

faaborg

Moving through Denmark today, past a few of the Kros, that stand by the roadside. "What's a Kro?" I hear you ask.

Its a kind of Danish 'Bed and Breakfast' location - very unique and family owned and somewhere I've stopped at in past visits to Denmark.

Today we stopped at one on the way to Faaborg and enjoyed a lunchtime Smorgasbord of herring, cheese and ham, before moving on to Faaborg for our overnight stop.

We had not realized that Faaborg was having a special evening party in the town, complete with a rock band and stopped a while to listen before, tonight, dropping in to a local Fotex supermarket to pick up a light snack to take with us for the evening.